Review: Life Lessons From Leadbelly in debut novel...

Sugar Land’s uneasy history as home to one of the most brutal prison-labor operations in Texas history flared back into the headlines this past March, when the remains of nearly 100 bodies were found on property the Fort Bend Independent School District had purchased from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in 2011.

More than a century ago, this land was known as the Imperial State Prison Farm.

But its problematic past is not under the microscope in Tammy Lynne Stoner’s “Sugar Land.” In the Midland native’s debut novel, the prison merely serves as an ideal location, or so it seems, for its heroine to escape a potent secret: her inconvenient attraction to members of the same sex.

In February 1923, when Dara comes to work at the prison, she is 19 years old, and the concept of lesbianism was as foreign to most Texans as Aramaic. However, her budding attraction to her college-bound friend Rhodie is sufficiently abhorrent to earn the scornful gazes of the women at her family’s church back in Midland — not to mention a sharp cuff on the ear by Rhodie’s mother when she catches the two girls in flagrante one rainy afternoon.

‘Sugar Land’

By Tammy Lynne Stoner

Red Hen Press

318 pages; $16.95

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In the appendix, Stoner acknowledges the unlikelihood that a woman would have found work in the Texas prison system of the 1920s, though millions already had in the state’s farms and factories by then. But “Sugar Land” is not so much fixated on factual accuracy as emotional resonance anyhow. The story Stoner wants to tell is about improbable kindnesses stubbornly taking root in harsh environments; the resourcefulness of people who feel they’ve been cursed not just by society but their own desires; and how the toughest prisons are often the ones we create for ourselves.

At first, Dara embraces the freedom of her enclosed surroundings. Its high walls represent somewhere she can escape from the unpleasant memories of Midland and — for a while anyway — hide out from the uncomfortable truth lurking beneath her skin. It proves easy enough to throw herself into her work when the warden, a no-nonsense ex-military man, tells her, “never serve meat (to the prisoners) that’s still bleeding because it turns them into animals.”

She finds a measure of gallantry in Beauregard, head of the kitchen staff and a fellow music lover; and learns to steer clear of the lecherous head cook, who makes an unsavory noise whenever he speaks that sums up his rancid character. Dara continues writing to Rhodie, but can’t bring herself to send the letters. Instead, she burns them inside a coffee can.

Rhodie doesn’t burn hers, however, and when the head cook gets ahold of them, it sparks a confrontation that could have been fatal if not for the advice of a towering, wet-eyed African-American convict who transcends his prison time by humming and, when permitted, singing.

Known to history as Leadbelly, king of the 12-string guitar and a crucial bridge between folk music and R&B, he’s simply known as “Huddie” to Dara. The two hit it off right away; “he gave me a look that said he hadn’t seen a woman in a while, and he liked women,” she notices. “It wasn’t threatening. He was just a hungry man examining a rack of ribs.”

Soon Dara is slipping Huddie an extra pat of margarine in the mess line and marveling as he makes up words to the ragtime instrumentals coming out of Beauregard’s radio. They start arranging clandestine meetings at the remnants of an old outbuilding known as the Wood, where Huddie helps her work up the grit to confront the head cook. His friendship also helps her, slowly, begin to get over Rhodie.

Due in no small part to Dara’s efforts, Huddie’s musical talents also come to the warden’s attention. He arranges for him to get a guitar he first uses to serenade the other prisoners — Dara and Beauregard sometimes listen from the kitchen, “like we were at church” — and to perform for the prison staff, their families and the occasional visiting dignitary. One of them is for the governor of Texas and, as they say, the rest is history.

If anything, Huddie exits “Sugar Land” a little too soon; none of Dara’s relationships in the rest of the book are quite as profound. Not that her life after that is at all uneventful. She winds up marrying the warden, successfully concealing her true sexuality, but is widowed just a few years later.

After Dara moves into a double-wide trailer she dubs “The Bland Old Opry,” she takes in an agreeable vagabond known as The Fiddler and spends much of her time marking the comings and goings of her two stepdaughters: Miss Debbie, the self-righteous older sister; and Eddie, whose nickname hints where her true proclivities lie. After years of traveling, Eddie’s sudden appearance with a baby — which she insists Miss Debbie raise while passing herself off as her “aunt” — at last prompts Dara to begin second-guessing certain preconceptions about her own identity.

Meanwhile, Dara’s sweet tooth almost proves her undoing. Luckily, because she needs bigger clothes, it also leads her to the door of one Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton, a fellow widow and one of Sugar Land’s top dressmakers (the other has just passed away). Just in the nick of time, Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton — whose name is never, ever abbreviated — shows Dara a world of new possibilities.

Stoner can turn a clever phrase — “My nerves jumped more than a grasshopper on a griddle”; “I was retaining enough water to grow rice in Arizona” — and her characters have unforeseen depths even they’re not always aware of. Dara’s may not be the kind of courage that wins medals in battle, but over the course of the novel, she develops the kind of quiet strength necessary for outsiders to turn going against the grain into both a daily routine and essential survival skill.

Her life — like “Sugar Land” itself — turns on a bit of old sailor wisdom that occurs to Dara as she watches Huddie walk out of prison after he’s sung his way to a commuted sentence.

“Given how strong the winds were pushing back,” she reflects, “even moving a few feet is a miracle.”